trying hard to post more!

Wow, two posts in one week, I am on a roll! We are at the Kadampa Meditation Center in Glen Spey, NY, which, in case you were wondering, is in the middle of no where and very beautiful.

The last few days have been cloudy but warm and we have been doing outside work. There are several trails around the property and we have been working with another working visitor with landscaping experience, Chad, to clear all of the trails. Some of them are a bit hard to follow so David and I are thinking about blazing them as well. We were in the woods for pretty much all of the daylight yesterday and today and I have really been enjoying it. Every winter I decide that I like winter woods the best, I love being able to see the trees for so far and to see all of their branches.

We have dorm-style accommodations in what was a barn but has been redone. It is very clean and organized, which we like. We generally (as general as two days can be) get up at about 8, have breakfast in the barn, and start working at 9. Lunch is served at 1, we work for a couple more hours and then rest/shower/read etc until dinner at 6. The monks and nuns take turn cooking great vegetarian food. The first day we helped put away their monthly grocery delivery and it was exciting to see what they got - tempeh, lentils, tofu, oats, soymilk, all in bulk. At 7:30 each evening they have a prayer service or lesson in the temple that we are invited to. Last night was a special service they do twice a month, with tea and food offerings. Tonight is more of a lesson, something about non existence and all of that...

Everyone here is kind, gracious, and welcoming. We are both enjoying being in an environment that is focused on loving kindness and compassion towards fellow humans. It will serve as an interesting contrast to our life on the road following phish, I am sure (the serenity, not the kindness - I think phish phans are very kind).

a pretty day for a drive

We are packing our things up and driving to Kadampa today. We have spent a long weekend in Massachusetts with my aunt and uncle, Brad and Carolyn, and my cousins Calyn, George, Reid, and Sophie. It has been very relaxing. On Saturday we took a walk on the water and went to the grocery store and that is about all we've done. I think it is the most relaxed we have been since we left Atlanta. Hopefully our week at Kadampa will also be restful, in a more concentrated way.

And We're Off...Again!

Our time at Teleion Holon is over. I know we didn't do many updates while were there. The honest answer is that we were completely busy all the time! There is a lot going on there. Once we moved in to our nicer digs (as you can see from pictures in previous posts) it was easier to settle in. There were 5 other wwoofers there during our time: lottie, inbal, alison, paul, and c.j. We really enjoyed interacting with other wwoofers who are doing things similar to adventurequest. When we were planning our trip in Atlanta we would tell people what we were doing and many people thought we were strange, crazy, or kidding. The people around Teleion didn't bat an eye when we explained we were wandering for an extended period of time.

David briefly described what our time was like - we did all kinds of tasks. Bonnie and Oliver, and their kids Guv, Talulah, and Eden, and the entire wwoofing operation have been in the process of moving over the summer, from the Teleion Holon farm to the house Oliver grew up in, called Earth, Sky, Time. So, a lot of our projects were related to getting stuff fully moved. They had just finished a full kitchen renovation before we got there. Again, like at Twin Oaks, I really enjoyed having access to a fully stocked kitchen! There were two weeks of the summer CSA left when we got there and I helped out with that a few times. I also got to help Lottie at the Sunday market. Those were the things I enjoyed the most, I think because it was an opportunity to interact with the people consuming what Teleion produces. It was a lot of fun to help set things up so they looked nice and then to be able to answer people's questions about what a vegetable was or how they should prepare it once they got it home.

We also helped with some plantings in the greenhouse, lots of cold hardy greens for the winter. There are two greenhouses at Earth Sky Time that had tomatoes during the summer and now have the greens, inside the greenhouses and with two layers of row covers, they should do pretty well, even in the Vermont cold.

There was lots of cooking, which always makes me happy. Partly, this was necessitated by the fact that there were usually around ten people for dinner every night. All of the wwoofers, Bonnie and Oliver, sometimes Oliver's parents, and then lots of other family, friends, and former wwoofers who would stop by throughout the week. We also spent a lot of time preserving vegetables from the fall harvest - i blanched a froze a ton of brussels sprouts and made a few huge batches of stock. Our last full week there we cooked for ten people staying at Teleion for a yoga retreat, meaning we were cooking lunch and dinner for twenty people for a full week.

In addition to enjoying the company of like-minded wwoofers, we really enjoyed the spirit of community at Bonnie and Oliver's. Eden (their 8 month old son) was passed to me within hours of their arrival and a day or so later I found myself with the farm jeep and Oliver's credit card. We had all of our meals communally and pretty much everything else had an easy family feel to it, something that I think can come about more easily because of the smaller number of people at a place like Teleion. This is something that we found lacking in our experience of Twin Oaks - there are so many different people doing different things that a lot of divisions seem to arise.

So, we left on Monday. We drove up to Burlington and wandered around and stayed with a friends of CJ and Alison - which was great, especially on short notice. Yesterday we drove over to Portland, Maine, with stops in Waterbury, Montpelier, and Glover. Today we wandered around Portland, took a Ferry to Peaks Island, and are now relaxing in our hotel room. Tomorrow we are going to tour the Allagash Brewery, which I'm sure David can talk about in more detail. Then, we are driving down to Massachusetts to stay with my aunt and uncle. Then we'll do our week long working visit at the Kadampa World Peace Temple in Glen Spey, NY.

The new development is that after Kadampa we are going to follow Phish for seven shows on their fall tour. Between Nov 18 and Dec 3 we will see them in Detroit, Cincinnati (2 shows), Philadelphia (2 shows), Albany, and NYC. This is very exciting, for David because he has been into them since high school and they have gotten back together and he has been trying to get me into them for a while, and for me because I enjoyed seeing them at Bonnaroo this summer and their light shows are awesome and I think it will be fun to see them a bunch and appreciate them more.

After that the next big plan is our departure for Costa Rica, we don't really have December figured out yet. We have some pictures to put up but I don't know where the camera is, I'll try to do that while we're in Massachusetts.

more vermont

Still farming in southern Vermont.

Most of our days start with breakfast around 8:30 leading to a morning meeting at 9ish. At the meeting we figure out what everyone is doing for the day and discuss upcoming projects. Maggie usually ends up working in the kitchen (cooking for the winter market or a retreat) and I do something outside (harvesting, working in the greenhouses, fix-up projects). This usually goes until around 1 when we have lunch for an hour and then have a meeting about afternoon work. That work goes until 5 or 6 and then goes into dinner prep. We have dinner and then clean up the dishes.

And that's what our days here look like. We'll be here for about 2 more weeks before we head to upstate new york to work-exchange at the buddhist meditation community.

Then the schedule changes a little bit because some local band from Vermont announced a fall tour and we're going to try to go to as many shows as possible. We're still working on tickets for that extravaganza of the rock and roll.

Vermont is unlike any other state I've ever visited. It's purposely rural, but doesn't have many of the negative aspects of rural life that I've come to recognize from growing up in the south. We'd kind of like to move here... but negative 20.

flannel and cheese: or how we are doing in Vermont

We are here

or more accurately, a little up the street from there because the farm has shifted to a second house, but we split operations between both places. we're working on a family farm that has a booth at a local farmers market and a weekly csa pickup (definition). most days we do some combination of planting or harvesting, taking care of animals (chickens, ducks, and dogs), and helping to run the income sources (csa and farmers market booth).

vermont is as beautiful during the fall as a thomas kinkade painting about fall would have you believe. (if thomas kinkade didn't live in a parallel dimension where all seasons happen at once and "artists" don't actually have to make art to be called artists and make a lot of money off of pictures better suited to bad greeting cards than canvases). Guess we'll just have a deal with beautiful rolling hills with a dozen shades of orange and red trees in a southern vermont valley. Sigh.)

our woofer hosts have three kids ranging in age from 7 months to four years. there are four other woofers other than maggie and me that represent a wide range of interests, ages, and backgrounds.

plus we bought 15 boxes of ice cream at the annual ice cream sale at the local gas station (it's actually good ice cream- not the usual questionable stop and gulp fare).

views from the front porch of the farmhouse:

we moved into the old green house at first. but it wasn't very ideal. (not kidding).

we tried to clean it up, but it was kind of a lost cause (bandanas to avoid mouse "dust") and moved in with another woofer into the old apple barn that had had a lot of work done on it.

much nicer...

Two (of the three) greenhouses

and the farm ducks (that were once pets of one of the kids, but he lost interest. now they just kind of hang out and swim in a puddle in the driveway.)

ok troops! carry on!

It was a Sunny Day in DC

Back from North Carolina and then to DC.

Maggie and I stayed with Emily O and the mighty Finn. Emily still works for NPR and has moved up the morning edition ranks. We've decided that NPR's ratings would triple if they gave Emily 10 minutes a day to talk about whatever she wanted to discuss. Because she's hilarious and her show would be hilarious.

We spent two days wandering around the museums up and down the mall and eating delicious food in China Town.

Oh, and we saw Sunny Day Real Estate at the 9:30 club. Which was kind of something I'd been looking forward to for my entire life. They played most of Diary and LP2, Guitars and Video Games (great song from HIFTBSO), and Spade and Parade. I was impressed by how much the band was in sync- and I think that Jeremy Enigk has a better command of his voice compared to when I saw the band in high school.


what do these characters say? i hope it's a really literal description of hooters. something like really mediocre food served by girls in tight clothes, but if anyone asks you think the wings are delicious. or as emily said: "it's probably not about the wings. because saying you go to hooters to eat the wings is like saying you read playboy for the articles."






awesome light installation.







Tomorrow we leave for our first WWOOF farm in Vermont. Alright.

Blue Ridge Ride and North Carolina

Blue Ridge Ride

I'd planned on doing an average of 60 miles a day for eight days with an average elevation gain of 6500 feet each day. I used a BOB trailer to haul gear behind my cyclocross bike. Long story short, I ended up doing roughly half of the parkway before I decided to call maggie to come rescue me. I enjoyed touring, but learned several lessons that make a successful tour tricky: no matter how strong of a cyclist one is- a fully loaded trailer should be matched with a triple- i rode a compact double with a mtn cassette- but started having really bad knee problems within one day of the tour, not riding for a month and being sick for two weeks before starting and expecting to still have a strong ride is rather silly and i should have known better, and carrying all of the tour's food from the start is also reasonably goofy.

So, all in all, I had a great experience. The parkway is beautiful and i encourage anyone who has an oppourtunity to enjoy some (or all) of the 470 miles. I like touring and will plan another trip (with proper gearing this time!). Pictures below.










Boone and Asheville

After the tour Maggie and I went to Boone for the afternoon, had food at the Black Cat, and walked around. Boone's a nice place, but the traffic (of all the things we didn't expect) drove us crazy. And yeah that was intended. Read the sentence again.

We spent the next day in Asheville- which was fantastic. We randomly ran into Ben Acree... still that's not all that surprising somehow. Ben may or may not be in Denmark right now. We went to the Highland Brewery, lucked into a Magic Hat tasting at a beer store, and had food and beverage at barley's. It was a nice place to be.







And this sign was great (though I didn't understand it)